Balor walked the vestibule out from the main hall of the Dominion’s Prime with his head about to explode with unwelcome thoughts. He had attended the selection ritual with lots of hopes and dreams, but he came out of it with nothing but dread.

  Having grown up in a different galactic arm far from the Prime, He had arrived anticipating good, spectacular things. His progenitors were Celestial Dragons, and he happened to inherit the rarest parts of them, becoming the youngest constellation serpent in the era.

  I thought I was blessed. How wrong I was.

  To be completely fair, the place did live up to his expectations.

  It was bigger than anything he had imagined before he arrived.

  His first days in the origin world of his species were the best. He was filled with awe and wonder. He visited every planet in the Dominion’s Prime as part of his pilgrimage to see the wonderful constructs of his great elders.

  Even if he was filled with dread now, all the wonder and curiosity that he came here with still lingered within his heart like an undying spark. The Prime world was an irresistible marvel that he couldn’t stop admiring.

  He planned on doing just that to clear his mind for the time being. It wasn’t wise to make critical decisions while drowning in so much dread.

  Taking a turn to the right, he arrived at a great lobby.

  He walked to a gigantic circular window that oversaw the Dominion’s Prime, a sprawling megastructure that was once constructed by his species.

  Everything about his old civilization was massive and decadent, constructed using more resources than what was available in the same system, everything gravitationally anchored around the home world in colossal rings.

  Dominion’s Prime preserved their legacy starting from the dirt, being born from eggs, running from predators for eons, harnessing fire, inventing weapons, agriculture, cities, and somehow becoming what they are now: each individual a God in themselves, mastering the cosmos on their own.

  The middle rings of the Prime were the alluring constructions of the old age of technology. Tall dwellings, roadways, spaceports, space ships, and artificial moons. Back in those times, his species had needed such infrastructure and mechanisms to navigate the space between worlds.

  The home planet bore the scars of their aspirations, a world stripped out of most of its resources except for the conserved sections where life still thrived the old way for posterity’s sake.

  It is here Balor knelt before Starmaker—the One Dragon—to receive his first world seed. It was a custom that thousands of other serpents had gone through before, each one pilgrimaging to the Prime once they reached the required maturity.

  As a population of godlike beings, his species was beyond rule and governance. It had incentives and direction instead, harnessing their naturally evolved blood drive for the betterment of their Dominion.

  Starmaker was the one who provided direction.

  She had dwelled in Dominion’s Prime since eons before he was born. It is said her soul was older than all the rings of their great construct. She was a living relic from deep history, where his ancestors used to be terrestrial beings, gazing longingly at the stars.

  Starmaker embodied the will of their species better than any other Dragon, and she knew the direction to guide the Dominion’s conquest of the rest of the galaxy.

  The incentive that came from their blood drive was the other component of their Dominion.

  The vehement rejection of the forward march of time, the desire to seed planets with sapient life, to foster and shepherd them to ascension, while embodying in themselves the same supreme serpentine doctrine. Any serpent who succeeded in this enterprise earned the coveted title of Dragon—the maker of worlds.

  Such dragons spread their Dominion in all directions, their fostered species creating new wonders, dissecting the cosmos in myriad other perspectives and repeating the same cycle themselves in the unfathomably distant future, carrying the will of their species written into the depths of their consciousness.

  A serpent wanted to be remembered, as they feared the void more than they feared pain or death. Becoming a Dragon ensured a serpent’s will outlived their lifecycles. It was no easy task, but it was strong enough to maintain a Dominion that spanned across three galactic arms.

  As a young serpent that was born with this blood drive, Balor had always respected Starmaker with reverence. She was myth incarnate because she only directly interacted with any individual exactly once: at their initiation ritual.

  All of his starry-eyed anticipation drained from him when she finally handed him his first world seed, because she had simply ruined his life before it even began.

  Staring at the Dominion’s Prime below him, Balor took the seed out of its containment harness and held it firmly in his hand. He wondered if there was any deeper meaning to her choice. He was the youngest constellation serpent. He was born for great things with a bright future; he had a lot of potential to make great contributions to the Dominion.

  She had thrown it all away by giving him hell itself.

  The world contained within the seed was named Veilthorn, the graveyard of serpents. It had been ridiculously hostile to taming that it was synonymous with a death sentence. No one even remembered the names of serpents who tried to tame it, because neither they nor their stories ever resurfaced.

  Does she want me dead for some reason?

  That was a pointless thing to wonder. No one knew what went on inside the One Dragon’s mind. She was a God of Gods, beyond comprehension for serpents like himself, and even for Dragons. She definitely had a reason for cursing him with this horrid world.

  Balor shoved the seed back into its containment harness and stepped away from the window. It was bound to his soul now. He had to face it now or a hundred eons later. This was his only path to becoming a Dragon.

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  Steeling himself with all the resolve that he could muster, he walked to the hall of traversal to retrieve his stellar core. He had to find a good star system for his world, and that meant travel.

  A lot of travel.

  Balor found his stellar core ready for him in the traversal hall.

  The place was just as deserted as the rest of the Dominion’s Prime, where he met no other serpent or a Dragon for the entire duration of his pilgrimage. Everyone else was preoccupied with their own worlds and tasks, which meant he had no one to seek wisdom from besides Starmaker. She had simply retreated to her own realm without another word after giving him Veilthorn.

  His stellar core was slotted into the first space exactly where he left it when he arrived. It loomed above him, a shifting ball of soul matter with purple-blue lightning within. It was his birthright, the combined materials of his progenitors who completed their long lifecycles to create him at the end.

  A stellar core was his species’ solution for the limits of the mortal shell. Their base form was sapient beings evolved from reptiles, and despite strides in augmented evolution, they still had physical limits unfit for spreading Dominion.

  Stellar cores allowed them to be more than mortals, pass down their soul matter to their descendants, aggregating power in genetics. A core could transform a serpent to their most ideal form for any task, be it terrestrial or interstellar. It was the key invention behind their full sovereignty as individuals to be wherever they needed, whenever they needed.

  His stellar core was a true testament to the power and glory of two Celestial Dragons. It gave him the greatest start in his serpent life. In this collapsed shapeless form, it was the size of a small asteroid, making his base form look like an insect beneath a boulder.

  Balor raised his hand and pulled it down to him. The stellar core obeyed, soul matter peeling away in layers and wrapping around him like a gigantic cloak.

  The sensations were still new to him because he had only used it once so far. As any young serpent with a stellar core, he was eager to traverse at any opportunity, and by giving him the world seed, Starmaker had essentially given him free rein to go anywhere he wanted.

  All the matter of his progenitors rearranged around him, mounting him into position. The neutral form had the combined Dragon features of his progenitors that he never met, making him a towering behemoth. The initial shape changed amidst an endless storm of internal thunder that rearranged the soul matter. The outer layers warped into a sleek, aerodynamic, winged shape fit for launching out of an atmosphere intending for interstellar travel.

  The stellar core directly interfaced with his thoughts, fluidly adapting to what he wanted the most: speed above all.

  Once fully transformed, Balor dashed out of the Dominion’s Prime toward the void of space in a single purple line, slipping into hyperspace as spacetime rippled around him.

  He had no destination in mind. He went slower and faster as he needed, popping in and out of systems as he searched for a good place to get started. Everything quickly blurred into a routine of browsing through stars, small yellow ones, big red ones, and even a weird green one.

  He went through thousands of systems with no sense of time. Hyperspace traversal wasn’t exactly enjoyable because it was too convenient. He only enjoyed something whenever he slowed down enough to look at it. The spectacular thing about this whole exercise was in the destinations reached, not the journey itself.

  He entered claimed systems twice and saw other seeded worlds being worked on by other serpents. He orbited such systems like a comet, staying around long enough to observe the planetary changes over time. He knew very well that watching other planets couldn’t teach him anything about taming hell, but seeded planets were always spectacular. They stood out to him like gems, and it made his blood drive churn.

  After dashing through three thousand and fifty systems looking for an ideal one for an indeterminate amount of time, he reached a system in a relatively empty section of the fourth Galactic arm.

  The star felt new and bright, slightly larger than it should be, but still manageable from a well-placed orbit. The system had four scorched planets too close to the star, and a fifth one that was strictly in the habitable zone. That planet already had liquid water, a thick atmosphere, and signs of primordial life. It was as large as all four of the others combined and had three satellite moons of varying sizes.

  A set of two gigantic gaseous planets remained in faraway orbits behind it, keeping most smaller astral bodies from reaching the inner system.

  Looks good enough.

  He was already getting too used to browsing worlds, and if he continued for longer, he could simply waste more time with indecision. His preferences and taste for systems would also blur away, and nothing would meet his standards, delaying things even further. It was good wisdom to start on the first one that caught his eye.

  All Sapient life required similar habitable worlds. He couldn’t go wrong with a reasonable choice like this one.

  Balor orbited the planet of his choosing for a few turns, inspecting the oceans and landmass. It didn’t really matter when it came to the world seed. Everything he was looking at would get transformed and warped to become Veilthorn, the untamed hell. This world was just an empty canvas, the matter that would be used to create the seed world with its properties.

  Deciding it was time, he burst through the atmosphere, his stellar core adapting into terrestrial traversal with huge wings and limbs to perch. The location he picked was in the middle of a huge thunderstorm, thick gray clouds swirling in great spirals, battering the ground.

  Great rivers flowed between valleys, slowly carving the terrain into interesting shapes.

  He had blood memories and eons of world-making experience of his progenitors encoded into his stellar core. In this form, he knew everything he needed to know at a glance. Life was early on this planet, and it wasn’t destined for sapience at any point. The world smelled stale, destined to stagnation for eons if left for natural evolution.

  Sapience was a hard thing for a planet to produce without the exact right conditions. Independently evolved Sapience was one of the rarest things in the Dominion. It had to be gifted with world seeds to guarantee good outcomes.

  Parting the storm clouds in his approach, he blew a crater in the middle of a mountain range upon impact, sending ripples through the planetary crust. This was a necessary prerequisite for planting the world seed.

  Balor detached himself from the stellar core, which idled in its Dragon form at the center of the crater, wings folded and perched on its clawed limbs. It loomed bigger than the mountains, glowing eyes casting blue light, cutting through the storm.

  He grabbed Veilthorn in his hand and walked a few paces away, feeling the scale of the world for the first time. He saw the world as its future inhabitants would’ve seen it before altering it forever.

  He placed the world seed beneath his feet and pushed it into the mud with his right hand. It had just one piece of encoded information that he wanted to see.

  Veilthorn, 1389.

  The seed had matured that many steps at the hands of the last serpent. Usually, it would’ve been best to reset it to the very beginning. Left unchanged, this seed was going to warp this plant to go through the same motions as it did before. This all but guaranteed failure, and if he somehow survived it, he would have to start with a clean slate in a new system on another similar world. If it destroys the planet, so be it.

  He raised his hand, and his stellar core ejected a luminous spiral of blue-purple connecting to the base of his spine. His eyes glowed in a single horizontal light, his body bursting with an unfathomable amount of energy.

  Thick mud and soil rippled around his feet like water, the planetary crust tremoring under the weight of his power.

  Flattening his palm, he poured it all into the seed, pushing it into the planetary core in a single beam. As it reached the core, the planet cracked, matter collapsing toward the center to be repurposed.

  Mountains parted as he went back into his stellar core, flying away in a purple line out of the atmosphere.

  Balor—the youngest constellation serpent—was given an extraordinary task by the Starmaker. He had come up with a reckless plan to survive it.

  He wanted to witness exactly where Veilthorn would fail.

  He had no problem sacrificing a planet for it.

  I’ll sacrifice as many as it takes.